The Fix: Dems Are Struggling With Reality

Democracy is gone. Most Democrats are having a hard time coming to terms with that.

After you’re done murdering democracy, should we maybe get some dinner? Wikimedia Commons

“I have talked to the president about Asian carp.”

—Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, shunting aside such trivialities as “democracy” in favor of the really important stuff.

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It seems like ages ago, but it was only February. Elon Musk’s unprecedented attack on the federal government was fueling a media freak-out over America’s impending slide into oligarchy.

I wrote a piece at the time explaining why I thought this view to be misguided. Musk’s influence, while extraordinary, masked his extreme vulnerability. “His immense wealth matters little when up against the guy who can wield the Justice Department as his personal bludgeon,” I argued.

The reason lay in the nature of the system that was emerging—not oligarchy, as many believed, but authoritarianism. Despite appearances to the contrary, Trump was the one in charge, not Musk.

Here we are two months later, and Musk has been pushed out. His ouster was not accompanied by the multiple F.B.I. probes that I predicted. But he is gone, nonetheless.

Nor is Musk the only business leader who has been forced to reckon with their newfound subservience. Last week, Taylor Lorenz described the rude awakening confronting America’s rich after getting into bed with Trump:

100 days in, tech leaders' unabashed support for Trump is blowing up in their faces. Their plan to cozy up to the president and receive favorable treatment has backfired, and the CEOs have been left reeling as they attempt to navigate the chaos the administration has wrought on their businesses.

Tesla’s stock has cratered. Zuckerberg is fighting an existential antitrust battle. Amazon and Apple are reeling from tariffs and supply chain disruptions, forced to pivot costly manufacturing operations out of China.

Media owners, universities, and law firms are also coming to grips with authoritarianism. Many have adopted a strategy of appeasing the king (spoiler alert: it is not working). Others are hunkering down in what are sure to be long, drawn-out fights against an administration that is being weaponized against them. One way or another, all have had to reconcile themselves to democracy’s extinction.

Ordinary Americans too are increasingly acknowledging the new authoritarian reality. The millions of people who have engaged in protests, boycotts, or other acts of civil resistance in the months since Trump’s inauguration are a testament to this. To date, such events have more than doubled their number from the same period of his first administration, according to Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium.

Still, one particularly important group has mostly remained oblivious to the change of regime. I am referring, of course, to the Democratic Party. To be sure, a few prominent Democrats see Trump for what he is and are conducting themselves accordingly. Some names that come to mind include Senators Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Chris Murphy, and Chris Van Hollen; House Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; Maine Governor Janet Mills; and Illinois Governor Jay Pritzker.

But most of the party, especially its leading figures, continue to act as if democracy will continue operating indefinitely.

It will not.

Authoritarianism and All That

Last week, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer greeted Trump with a hug as he touched down in her home state. She was there to grovel and beg the president for federal funds to expand a local military base. This came on the heels of her White House visit early last month, when she stood at his side as he finished drowning the republic in the bathtub.

“I had to be there because this was a big, important thing for the state of Michigan,” she explained, defending her choice to appear at the Michigan event. “Now, he is going to go off to the rally and say a lot of things I disagree with, that I’ll fight against, and that’s fine.”

For many Democrats, including Whitmer, authoritarianism, while noteworthy, is but another issue among many others the party should address. There is Medicare, prescription drug prices, tariffs, the economy, and—oh, right—the country’s descent into an authoritarian abyss.

If anything, they believe, authoritarianism is a distraction from these other priorities. Sure, it might be of interest to activists. But the true-blooded American whose vote the party is really after? Somebody whom mainstream Democrats seemingly imagine as the cowboy hat-wearing, lasso-wielding hunk from a Ford Raptor commercial? What this guy really wants to talk about is the health insurance premium tax credit, not the foreign black sites to which his farm laborers are getting hauled off in violation of their Fifth Amendment right to due process.

An exchange between Whitmer and Pod Save America host Jon Favreau encapsulates the absurdity of this worldview:

Favreau: Trump is currently investigating Michigan colleges and universities for their diversity policies. He's already tried to kick dozens of Michigan foreign students out of the country. He's threatening to unlawfully freeze federal funding for Michigan public schools, as he's already doing in Maine, because Governor Mills spoke up in a meeting. Have you asked the president to stop targeting people and institutions in your state?

Whitmer: You know, I have talked to the president about tariffs, which obviously we don't agree on. I have talked to the president about Asian carp that pose a real threat to the Great Lakes. I have talked to the president about ice storm victims in northern Michigan, who I’m hoping we can get some help from FEMA to support. I have not had that direct conversation on this subject yet.

Democrats love “issues.” They love them so much that they pay consultants vast sums to divine the particular issues with which the public is most concerned. They then try to fine-tune their messaging to convince voters that they too are prioritizing those issues. For the past fifty-odd years, this has been the party’s core strategy.

Even in normal times, it is a terrible and self-defeating approach. As Democrats jump from one issue to the next, changing their stance according to latest poll results, they end up looking like shifty, vacillating wimps too afraid to say what they really think.

Now that they constitute the only functional opposition in an authoritarian regime, it is even worse. Treating “democracy” as but a single issue among a bundle of others distracts the party from the one thing they need to focus on, which is ending authoritarianism. Unless democracy is restored, there is precisely zero chance that Democrats will ever make progress on their beloved “kitchentable concerns” such as healthcare and the economy.

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In the next few years, a mass movement against Trump’s regime is almost certain to emerge. One way or another, it will gain leaders. Whether or not current Democratic incumbents end up receiving those leadership roles is largely up to them.

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Whitmer is far from the only Democrat who has failed to grapple with authoritarianism. For most of her colleagues, Trump, while loathsome, is just another Republican serving out his term. He might be threatening democracy, to be sure, but hardly to the point that the Democrats need to do anything differently than they already are.

The notion that the GOP might succeed in overturning an election is not something most Democrats appear to take that seriously. Consequently, the fate of democracy, though a concern, is merely one issue of many, and certainly not as important as Social Security.

Consider Gavin Newsom, who runs a podcast that might as well be called “Things About Fascism that I, Gavin Newsom, Can Really Get Behind.” In it, the California governor finds areas of agreement with his repulsive MAGA guests despite whatever quibbles he might have about their lust for dictatorship.

Then there is Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer who, when asked by a CNN host whether he would back a Democratic initiative to impeach Trump, could not bring himself to say, simply, “yes.” “Our goal is to show the American people over and over again, whether it’s the economy, whether it’s tariffs, whether it’s Russia and overseas, and whether it’s the rule of law, how bad he is,” Schumer replied, glancing down at a crib sheet of “issues” some staffer had put together in advance.

With so many “issues” to cover, you see, it can be hard to keep track of them all.

Hakeem Jeffries, Schumer’s counterpart in the House, takes a similar line. In an interview with Greg Sargent of the New Republic, he was asked if “Democrats could be doing more to draw public attention to the lawlessness of Trump, the ripping up of the constitutional order, the dismantling of the rule of law, and fundamental betrayal of our country that’s at the core of all these abuses of power.”

Sure, Jeffries replied, of course he is concerned about the trashing of democracy. But that is only one of the many issues the party wants to address, including:

the economic well-being of the American people; defending Medicaid and health care; defending [against] the assaults on Social Security; making sure they can’t take food out of the mouths of children [italics included], which is what they’re trying to do with this reckless Republican budget to pay for tax cuts for Elon Musk and their billionaire puppet masters. That’s crazy. This is what they are trying to do right now in real time. So we’re going to have to continue to stand up to all the things—and that, of course, will include protecting the rule of law.

Elections and All That

This phenomenon, in which Democrats talk about authoritarianism not as the existential threat that it is but rather as an “issue,” is predicated on another outmoded assumption: that election victories are the only thing they need to win power.

This was a reasonable assumption back when America was a democracy. But it is not a democracy anymore; it is an authoritarian regime. Elections will indeed remain critical going forward. But they will not be sufficient on their own to remove Republican incumbents—not unless they are accompanied by massive, nonviolent civil resistance.

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At the current rate, moderate Democrats are going to four-dimensional-chess their way into a Republican coup d'état in 2029.

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Some Democrats, like Pritzker, are starting to understand this. But most continue to see the median voter as the ultimate fulcrum of American politics. That is no longer true (to the extent that it ever was). As long as authoritarianism prevails, it is the median protester, not the median voter, whom the Democrats must make the primary target of their appeals. That protester is more likely to be motivated by the attack on human rights than the price of eggs.

Most Democrats have yet to realize this. Consider a few examples:

“It doesn’t win elections to just speak to the base of the party,” declared Senator Elissa Slotkin. Whether or not it wins elections, it does bring people into the streets, an imperative the Democrats had better start prioritizing.

There is nothing self-described “moderates” in the party detest more than the mild scent of enthusiasm. Take Matt Bennett, a vice president at Democratic think tank Third Way, who threw cold water upon the astoundingly successful rallies led by Bernie Sanders and AOC. “Crowd size is the worst metric in American politics,” he remarked.

Correction: Crowd size was the worst metric in American politics. Now, it is the most important metric.

As long as many Democrats continue to regard winning elections as their only job, they will keep up their fixation with the “median voter.” In Democratic Party mythology, the median voter is a white Iowan farmer who thinks of nothing other than Medicare Part D and gets offended whenever someone has the gall to mention the ongoing evisceration of free government. His preferences can only be divined through a ritualistic ceremony involving essential oils, incense, and opinion polls. But if the polls suggest that he does care about the preservation of the republic, Democrats should not believe it; instead, they must continue talking only about the pocketbook issues which really motivate him.

This fetishization of the median voter helps explain some otherwise bizarre reactions of late.

It explains, for instance, one anonymous House Democrat’s quip that Senator Van Hollen’s visit to El Salvador was distracting Democrats from “talking about the tariff policy and the economy.” Even though Van Hollen’s trip managed to place the outrageous and illegal renditions at the center of national attention for days, the Democratic representative pooh-poohed the deportation issue as a “soup du jour.”

It likewise explains Hakeem Jeffries’s desire to pretend that the deportations do not exist. Asked whether Democrats should continue pushing the issue, the House speaker could not even bring himself to mention it: “Our reaction,” he declared, “is that Donald Trump has the lowest approval rating of any president in modern American history,” as if there is some magical threshold of public disapproval that would compel Trump to leave office voluntarily.

This compulsive aversion to controversy is often rationalized by the presumption that shining a light on Trump’s abominations somehow plays into his hands. In the words of one Democratic staffer, the Congressional trips to El Salvador are “fodder for the National Republican Campaign Committee to start using it against other Democrats.”

How, exactly, would bringing attention to Trump’s repugnant cruelty play into his hands? Good question! I, for one, have no fucking idea.

But leading Democrats do, and they ask us to trust that they know what they are doing.

Maybe, however, they do not know what they are doing. Maybe the problem is Trump’s relentless onslaught against constitution and country, not the few Democrats who criticize him for it. Maybe the only way that Democrats really can play into his hands is by refraining from calling him out.

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Most of the party, especially its leading figures, continue to act as if democracy will continue operating indefinitely. It will not.

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The problem with overthinking everything like most Democrats do is that the entirety of their elaborate mental calculations only ever converge upon a single strategy: hiding under the bed whispering “kitchentable priorities” in hopes that somebody might actually hear it.

At the current rate, moderate Democrats are going to four-dimensional-chess their way into a Republican coup d'état in 2029.

Many Democrats see a tension between the concerns of mainstream voters and the party base. Issues like democracy and human rights might appeal to leftwing activists, they believe. But they go over the heads of ordinary voters who are more preoccupied with putting food on the table than the right to due process.

To the extent that this tension was ever real, it will soon cease to exist. Authoritarianism is here, and it is going to get much, much worse. Once Trump begins detaining political subversives by the thousands and crushing protests with military force, his brutal, criminal rule will likely become the single defining issue in American politics. When it does, expressing unrelenting outrage at his autocratic excesses will become a prerequisite for any Democrat to gain—or retain—office. Doing so will not only achieve election victories but bring out the protesters who will stop those victories from getting overturned.

In the next few years, a mass movement against Trump’s regime is almost certain to emerge. One way or another, it will gain leaders. Whether or not current Democratic incumbents end up receiving those leadership roles is largely up to them. Without the support of the Democratic establishment, the movement will struggle. With the party’s support, it will become unstoppable.

There is no need to overthink the matter. Democrats could do worse than to follow AOC’s lead. Back when the controversy erupted over Elon Musk and Steve Bannon’s Hitler salutes, she responded simply and directly: “In this country, we hate Nazis.” That is really the only posture the Democratic Party needs to take. Do it, and the American people will get behind you.

Alternatively, keep talking about Medicare as if nothing out of the ordinary is happening.